OK this is embarrassing :) After enough problems for me to work out a cron bash script as a workaround kmail is behaving AOK. I have run it for 3 days straight, all AOK, OK I will run it for another 3 days and see. Dave ... one of the few occasions when I WANT software to misbehave ... :) -- kmail 'goes to sleep' https://launchpad.net/bugs/73639